I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (34 page)

Hell, didn't I say somewhere, is the absence of God and the
presence of Time.

After a long pause - the dismal rendition of `Stairway'
replaced now by the speakers' endless exhalation of static or
hiss - I looked up and met Raphael's sorrowful eyes. `Oh,' I
said. `I see.'

(It was something to think about on the flight back to
London. For the sake of argument I had a (pointless) go at
believing it. It was a kind of victory, when you thought
about it. Last man standing and all that. You know, if you
looked at it that way. Kind of.)

`So this is all ... what, exactly?' I asked Raphael, rhetorically, the night before I left. `The best you can come up
with? Me and you living on a Greek island reading Rilke
and desultorily managing half a dozen restaurants while the
Old Man gets up the nerve to ring down the curtain?'

`There are worse lives,' he said. The two of us were on
the veranda again. The sun had gone down, gaudily, with
exhausted passion; we'd watched from the western side of
the island, having ridden out on Raphael's two sorrel
mares, lunched on olives, tomatoes, feta, cold chicken, a
plummy red with peppery undertones. I'd stretched out,
shadow-dappled under the eucalyptus, and he'd wandered
away to fish. To give me a bit of room. Now, back at the
villa, we sat facing the sea's deepening shadow and the first
faint scatter of stars. Funny to think of stars disappearing.
Funny to think of Everything disappearing. Except me.
Funny.

`I thought you'd need. .: He'd been going to say `help' I
could tell. `A companion. It's not easy, is it, this mortal life.'

I thought of the photograph of Gunn's mother and of the
Clerkenwell flat's sad little corners. `Not unless you're prepared to make the effort,' I said. `Most mortals aren't. We've always known this. That the whole fucking thing would be
wasted on them.'

'Like Wilde's youth on the young.'

`It wasn't Wilde,' I snapped. 'It was Shaw.'

Later, that piccante little exchange having hovered between
us like something imperfectly exorcised, he came into lily
room in the small hours. I knew he knew I was awake, so I
didn't bother pretending to be asleep. The moon was up, a
solitary petal of honesty casting stone-coloured light on the
Aegean, the sleeping harbour, the hill, the veranda, the terra
cotta, the silk-fringed counterpane, my bare arms. His eyes
were slivers of agate. It would have been nice for me if the
bed had made a silly noise when he sat on it - some boinq or
ti►'oin,' - but the mattress was solid and silent, no help at all.
I'd drunk too much and not enough.

`No, Raphael,' I said.

'I know. Not that. I just mean: Please think about it,
okay?'

'Although it seems rude not to, given that we've got the
flesh.'

'Don't play with me, please.'

`Sorry. I know. Truth is, there's a good chance I'd give
you something.' He didn't understand. `Something nasty,' I
said. He was bare-chested, in pale pyjama bottoms. Theo
Mandros's body was brown and lean with ropy muscle in
the long arms and a small pot belly of almost unbearable
pathos. His dead wife had loved it; the ghost of her love
still surrounded it in a little crescent of warmth. It suited
Raphael.

'Tell me something,' he said.

`What?'

'Why you've found it so hard to admit that you've considered it?'

`Considered what?'

`Staying.'

I half-smothered the laugh, very inadequately tried to
pass it off as a cough. Slowly reached for and lit a cigarette.
`I assume - hard though this is to countenance - that you
mean staying here, staying human?'

`I know you've considered it. I know the flesh's seduction.'

`What a lot you seem to know, Mr Mandros. I wonder
why you bother to ask anything at all.'

`I know your capacity for self-delusion.'

`And I know yours for credulity. Not to mention limpwristed infatuation.'

`You lie to yourself.'

`Good night, I3iggles:

`You deliberately avert your gaze from the true appeal of
this world.'

`And that would be ... what, exactly? Daisies? Cancer?'

`Finiteness:

Oh the nasty things I nearly came out with then. Really.
It's lucky for him we were old chums. All things considered,
I was glad imminent operations wouldn't affect him.

`Lucifer?' he said, putting a hand on my pelvis. `Is the
peace of forgiveness so terrible a thing to embrace? Wouldn't
redemption be the mightiest gift He could give? Haven't
you ever, in all these years, haven't you ever once longed to
come home?'

I sighed. Sometimes, I've found, sighing's just the thing.
Moonlight lay on my face now like a cool veil. My bedroom
doors opened onto the veranda; the white wall; the constellations' impenetrable geometry. There'd be an epiphany, I
was thinking. Anyone else's story, this is where the tide
would turn, objectively correlatived by lyrically described
buggery, no doubt. Any other fucker's story.

'Raphael,' I said - then, staying in character, added,
'Raphael, Raphael, Raphael.' Didn't quite have the effect I
was after, somehow. None the less I pressed on. 'Let me ask
you something, dear boy. Do you think I despair?'

`Lucifer -'

'Do you think I exist in a state of despair?'

`Of course you do. Of course you do, my dear, but what
I'm trying to suggest is that -'

'I do not despair.'

`What?'

'You heard.'

'But -'

'Despair is for when you see defeat beyond all hope of
victory.'

`Oh, Lucifer, Lucifer.'

'I repeat: I do not despair. Now please, for fuck's sake, go
to bed.'

He didn't. He sat there next to me with his palm against
my hip and his head bowed. I might have been mistaken but
I thought I saw the glimmer of tears. (And I know this is
really awful, but I did, actually, feel the first scrotal stirrings
of an impending erection. Typical.)

This time he sighed. Then said: `What are you going to
do?'

'I'm going back to London.'

`When?'

'Tomorrow. I need ...' What did I need? The flat? The
Ritz? To finish the script? The book? To idiot-check the
details of my upcoming venture? (Well I did say at the very
beginning that I wasn't telling quite all ...) 'I need to be
alone with it. With what you've told me. It's not that I don't
believe you -'

`You don't believe me, Lucifer, I know. Why should you? Why should you think this was anything more than some
ruse to ... to ...'

Couldn't finish that. Got up and padded on Mandros's
long bare feet to the door, where he halted and said, to the
tiles, `I just want you to know that I'm here. I've made my
choice.'

`No month's trial?' I asked him.

I saw the gleam of his teeth in the moonlight. `Up a long
time back,' he said. `This is my home, now.' Then, again to
the floor: `And yours, too, old friend, should you need it.'

I don't know what you'd call it. Goin' Loco Down in
Acapulco - except it wasn't Acapulco, it was London. A
farewell binge, I suppose. Tying one on. A bender. A spree.
I'd half a nand to kill the last week in Manhattan, but the jetlag would've slowed me down and every hour was precious;
by the end of the week in London, it just felt like I'd half a
mind. First thing I did was e-mail the bulk of this to Betsy
with instructions to read it and whiz it out to the usual suspects ASAP. If the thought of slipping out of Gunn's bones
hadn't entailed the thought of excruciating pain I'd have
dropped in bodilessly on the head honchos at Picador or
Scribner or Cape or whoever the fuck, to work the necessary chicanery; but the memory of my big ouch over the
Aegean was still fresh. No need to repeat that before I
absolutely have to. Anyway the point is I let myself go. Man
did I let myself go. Have you had flambeed mangoes? There
are so many flowers in my room now that I can't handle
more than three XXX-Quisite girlies without crashing into
a vase or bruising a blossom. I've prowled the city's parks and
yards day and night molesting odours of every stripe, from

freshly laundered bed sheets to the diarrhoea of dogs. I've
fist-fought in Soho (I won, perhaps not surprisingly - cone
a long way since the night with Lewis and his beard) and
bungeed over the Thames. I've snuffled and retched my way
through three grand's worth of Bolivian Breeze, dropped E,
acid, speed, shot up, tuned in, turned on and passed out. I've
been ravished by the warm wind and rinsed by the rain.
Blood is a juice of quality most rare ... Oh I've manhandled,
I have, stone, water, earth, flesh ... Yesterday night I swam
in the sea. Don't laugh - at Brighton, where the pier's lively
fug (candyfloss, mussels, hot dogs, popcorn) and delirious
soundtrack dropped the nukes of Gunn's childhood in my
head, tipping nie momentarily off balance. I swam out and
flipped onto my back like a sea] pup. The water was a dark
and salty slick, the sky diagrammed with myth. I got
depressed as hell (not to mention cold as hell - five seconds
of warm bliss when I emptied Gunn's bladder) hanging there
all alone and looking back to the seafronts chain of lights.
Nearly drowned, too, as a matter of fact, what with that coke
nod-out when I should have been kicking back to shore.
Where would that have left us, I wonder? (I wonder a lot,
these days. You must spend your whole lives at it, this wondering game.) But time - this New Time, how it-flies - has
done what time will do. Every hour, no matter how mighty
the wall of your dread, comes through ...

The funk, the jive, the boogie, the rock and roll ... the
weight of the body draws it down, to the dirge of the dark
cortege. This won't do, for you or for me. Tomorrow is
clocking-off day, and after a week of extremes, I find myself
strangely drawn to the predictable smallness of the
Clerkenwell flat. There are unique comforts, it seems, in
the most lifeless crannies of life: the tinkle of the spoon in
the cup; the kettle-fogged pane; the floor's worn poem of ticks and groans; the PC's unjudgemental hum; the fan's
feeble campaign against London's summer of bruisers and
thugs. (I don't think Gunn's body's very well at the moment.
The whites of his eyes contain startled capillaries and
spooked pupils. His back's killing me and his teeth itch. The
skull's ducts rattle and creak with mucus and even Harriet
would think twice before letting this mossed and maculate
tongue anywhere near her sensitive parts.) Besides, I need
somewhere quiet to think, and to finish this at least.

Think if it were true. It isn't true, obviously, but there's a
masochist in here that will have his fifteen minutes. Can't ...
cannot be true. But think if it were true. A comfortable life -
Mr Mandros would do as a decompression chamber, a comfort zone, a kind of arrivals lounge facility - no real theoretical
objection to living it with moderate ethical decency; plenty
to enjoy in the perceptual realm that wouldn't land me in jail
or send me to the chair - you know: tulips; kissing; snow;
sunsets; journeys; and so to death, the obligatory purgative
stint, then home. Home.

Honie? How long has that word meant anything other
than Hell? Which reminds me, there is still the matter of .. .
ah ... There is still, vividly, the memory of what the incorporeal version of my existence ,felt like last week. In other
words how much it.fucking killed. Can't help thinking that's
left me in a bit of a corner. Should have seen that coming
sooner. Should have kept myself in shape with regular nights
off from the body. Should have done shifts.

Course I'm going on like this as if I'm even considering it.
Considering staying on, I mean. Considering being Declan
Gunn. Course I'm going on like this as if there won't shortly
be wheels of a very different kind in cacophonous motion.
Course I'm ...

Well.

I'm not turning any of the lights on in the flat. The hot
gloom and steady rain comfort me. Like Hydra's sunlight and
silence, they let me drift into dream. Thunderstorms since
the early hours. Never really seen storms from your end.
Don't they make you doubt what you learned at school?
Don't you hear thunder and think: all that atmosphere stuff,
it's cobblers; the sky's made of iron that sometimes shifts and
grumbles, billion-ton slabs and plates forced through the
same tectonic trials as earth, yielding this, this skyquake. Oh
yes, it's been up to spectacular tricks since the small hours has
the weather. I watched the lightning revealed in glimpses,
the sky's shocking varicosis. The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The
clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot
look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on?
Surely you take a Playstation break?

I forget myself. Of course you don't. Of course you don't.
I've put a lifetime's work into making sure you don't. How
could I possibly forget,

In the summertime, when the weather is ... How these
minutes fly! Six minutes past six, the fifth second morphing
digitally into the sixth just as my eyes focused. Little red
numbers in the darkness. Is somebody pulling my leg here?
Betsy's going to have to cut this. I don't have the time to